Schools everywhere teach four basic subjects: math, science, language arts, and history. Each subject is necessary to help educate and prepare the students for the adult world, but is history truly a good thing to be teaching children?

History is an excellent subject to be taught in schools. History is everyone’s past; it concerns everyone everywhere, and it’d good to know how we got to where we are in the world and all the fighting required to make this world possible. Knowing history helps you to understand and appreciate the modern world and how it became what it is today. History also helps us to remain at peace with the other countries. It has been said that history repeats itself, so knowing history helps us to prevent making the same mistakes our ancestors made. Because we are learning and improving, the modern world is thriving.

History isn’t all good, though: war, blood, sadness, death, and ruthless dictators have made history a gruesome and often sad thing to be taught to children. As students progress in school, they are shown dark movies with explicit detail of bloody wars. Students are young; they are still developing physically and mentally, their impressionable minds soaking in new information like a sponge. Children learn by mimicking, and even though seeing the war movies is supposed to prevent history from repeating itself, it may be doing the opposite. In the early sixties, psychologists Bandura, Ross, and Ross did a study called “The Bobo Doll Experiment.” He had children watch an adult beat up a clown doll, and when he put the children alone with the doll, the children repeated the behavior. When students watch informational videos in school about war, are they actually just subconsciously soaking up ways and reasons to go to war?

History is taught everywhere to students and many different ages, and knowing these facts have many advantages and disadvantages, but is it truly worth it? We have been teaching history since the dawn of school, and yet, we have never experienced peace around the world. Therefore, history is a pointless subject to be taught in school, and it should be a choice to take it, not a required class.